Every year, there's a big Hollywood film which has fashion stylists, window dressers and magazine editors clapping their hands in glee because it offers what's known as "a peg" on which to hang a look, a shop display or a fashion feature.
"Fantastic!" they say as they sit in meetings in which nobody has any idea at all about what to do next. "Fantastic! We can piggy-back on this big Hollywood film! That's us sorted till autumn."
Yes, fantastic. Well, it is if the film in question is, say, On The Road, because it means the high-street mannequins and magazine models will suddenly sport a look which is achievable for most men because it's what they wear pretty much every day: namely jeans and a T-shirt, with maybe a plaid shirt or a leather jacket on top.
This year's big Hollywood film is considerably more problematic, however. It's Baz Luhrmann's adaptation of the novel that its author, F Scott Fitzgerald, was originally going to call Trimalchio In West Egg but which he eventually christened The Great Gatsby. (Trimalchio, as I'm sure you know, is the wealthy social upstart in Petronius's Satyricon; West Egg is the fictional Long Island town in which Fitzgerald's novel is set.)
If you've seen the 1974 film version with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow (and with costumes by Ralph Lauren), you'll know the sort of thing that's now expected of us men: pastel shades, sharp suits, luxurious shirts and two-tone brogues. Gulp!
Turn to the book for relief and it's no better. When narrator Nick Carraway first encounters Jay Gatsby it's because the latter has sent his chauffeur across the lawn between their respective houses with a party invitation. The chauffeur, writes Fitzgerald, is wearing "a uniform of robin's-egg blue". The chauffeur! (By the way, in my Observer's Book Of Birds' Eggs the robin's egg is a sort of mottled brown, but I'll let that pass.) Carraway dons white flannels for the party and Gatsby, when he meets him, is described as being tanned and attractive with short hair that "looked as if it was trimmed every day". I don't know about you, but I'm already out of the game – and we haven't even got to Gatsby's clothes yet.
When they are detailed, they give us a look which is so unattainable it's laughable. Here's Gatsby on page 81 wearing "a white flannel suit, silver shirt and gold-coloured tie"; here he is a few pages later throwing open a "hulking" cabinet to display silk and linen shirts "piled like bricks in stacks a dozen high - shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, with monograms of Indian blue".
All I've got is a rickety Ikea warbrobe filled with Gap T-shirts, and the only stripes I can see are on my AC Milan replica football top – 100% polyester, since you ask. Fashion wise, I think I'd better sit this one out.
barry.didcock@heraldandtimes.co.uk
Twitter: @barrydidcock
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